


Lies Like Sugar on Your Lips

by Love_andbalance



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Reylo, Dark Side HEA, Deception, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fake Amnesia, Force Dyad (Star Wars), Intentional Trickery, Loss of Virginity, Major characters will die, Mistakes were made, Name-Calling, Reylo - Freeform, Sexist Language, The Resistance Is Not Nice, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:40:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29073468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Love_andbalance/pseuds/Love_andbalance
Summary: Based on a fabulous @beccastanz Twitter prompt!The Resistance concocts a brilliant plan and they convince Rey to go along with it. All they have to do is get the new Supreme Leader to the Resistance Base and convince him that he defected to their side before he lost his memories. It seems foolproof, especially with Rey as bait to convince him that he wanted to be there all along.But Kylo Ren is no fool, and this isn't going to go the way they think.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 251
Kudos: 331





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The five chapter estimate is entirely a guess! It might be more or less depending on how everyone in the story decides to behave!
> 
> My lovely moodboard was a gift from vikki in the Reylo Creatives Discord server.

“You want me to lie to him?”

Rey’s face was scrunched, her skin pinched in distaste at the thought of what they were suggesting. Ben had never lied to her, not even when it would have been easier, or more convenient…not even when she’d wanted him to, as she had in Snoke’s throne room when he’d refused to bend and offer her useless platitudes about her parents.

“Yes,” Leia said calmly. “It seems, from what you’ve told us about your time on Ahch-To and the events that occurred on the _Supremacy,_ that Kylo Ren might have a bit of a soft spot for you.”

“He cares about you,” Poe said quickly. “Or, at the very least, he values you for your abilities. You’d be dead if he didn’t.”

Rey shifted in her seat, looking around at the dim walls of the small room where Leia slept these days. After so many years in the dry heat of the desert, it still surprised her that Ajan Kloss was warm and humid enough to create drops of water out of nothing but air in every cool and shadowy place. The dew dripped in lines down the dark creases of Leia’s makeshift bedchamber, the pathways already set by the ones that had come before, the outcome unavoidable.

It was a feeling of preordained destiny that she could suddenly and uncomfortably relate to.

This was a private meeting, with very few witnesses.

Rey herself.

Leia.

Finn and Rose.

Poe and Kaydel.

Five masterminds and one begrudging almost Jedi whose heart still ached for a man who was, at his core, a broken boy that believed he could trust no one.

They wanted her to _lie_ to him.

“It’s for the greater good,” Rose said, a wheedling note in her tone and bright hope in her eyes. “You’d be helping him, really, because he would be saved from himself and his own destructive impulses.”

“Technically,” Poe added helpfully, “you wouldn’t even be the only one lying to him. We would all have to lie to him. Literally. All of us.”

“You don’t think that this is a little bit dangerous?” Rey asked. “A little bit foolish to bring him here with nothing at all to keep us safe but this lie?”

“Even if he somehow figures it out,” Leia said, “what could he do here? He would be on the base, unarmed and surrounded by Resistance members. We will keep you perfectly safe.”

Dread coiled through Rey’s body, each nerve ending alight with the need to deny them, to tell them no and explain the risk that she could sense lingering over this idea.

Leia’s hand came to rest on hers, the older woman giving her fingers a soft squeeze.

“You do want to help him, help _us_? Don’t you Rey?”

***

“Explain to me again why the Supreme Leader and the First Order’s flagship are hovering over some planet no one’s ever heard of in the Mid Rim?”

She was squatting miserably at the foot of an umbrella tree, squinting at a group of lights in the distance that she knew had to Balnab’s only spaceport. She’d gotten Leia’s report this morning, a brief and cryptic message on her datapad that said this was the right time and the right place to execute the plan, but a brief glance at the attached file on the planet they were headed to had been all she’d needed to know everything there was to know about it.

Balnab was located at the edge of the Mid Rim region, it had one spaceport, it had never been a major concern of the Empire, the Rebellion, either Republic or the First Order. There had been no hidden bases, no secret trade routes, no smuggling rings.

It was barely developed, perfectly ordinary, and utterly boring.

Or at least it had been, until the _Millennium Falcon_ had come screaming into its atmosphere a scant few minutes ahead of the _Finalizer._ The Resistance intel had gotten them here just in time to witness the large dreadnought appear menacingly in the planet’s upper atmosphere.

“We’ve been running intel through Balnab,” Poe explained, “and we let it slip to the First Order spies.”

“Well, that’s good enough to get these people an unfortunate visit from a few stormtroopers but one spy doesn’t bring the Supreme Leader of the galaxy.”

It didn’t make any sense for him to be here, but she knew he was. She’d been able to feel him since before she’d been able to see the ship. He was always there, at the edges of her consciousness, but now he was close enough that she could sense his excitement, his determination, his _need_.

A tendril of something potent snaked its way through her body and she told herself it was fear.

“Any other spy,” Finn said with a grin, “but we told them it was you.”

“What?”

“The info we fed back to the First Order was that you were the primary contact passing information through Balnab.”

“So, he didn’t come all the way here for a spy…”

“He came for you,” Poe finished. “Now we just have to get him to come out and try to find you.”

“He won’t,” she objected. “He’ll just send a bunch of stormtroopers.”

“I doubt it,” Finn argued. “He knows what you’re capable of and he’s made it very clear since Crait that he wants you captured alive. He’ll send the troopers, but he’ll come with them.”

“I don’t know that I like being used as bait,” she groused, her heartbeat quickening as a stream of lights descending from the dreadnought above signaled the beginning of the ground assault.

“We have people planted inside that are supposed to help create a distraction. That’ll keep most of his forces busy but if he can sense you out here…Can he?”

Rey nodded jerkily, unsure if Finn could even see her in the dark, shielded from even the light of the stars by the tree they were under.

“Good,” Finn said. He sounded relieved, like he was just realizing that they should have asked about that before now instead of assuming. “He’ll sense you and he’ll come for you.”

“You know what to do, right?” Poe was suddenly anxious, his voice shaky and his presence in the Force spiky and unsettled. “You can do it?”

She nodded again, but she was barely listening. She could feel Ben and he was closer now. Frustration building to anger as they searched for her in the space port and found nothing.

She jumped at the explosion that lit up the night sky, sending flames rocketing above the buildings and illuminating the landscape. She could see her tree now and the soggy wet marsh that stood between them and the space port.

She swallowed hard, struggling to resist the urge to reach out across the Force, across the bond, to see if he was hurt. She needn’t have worried, as her question was answered when she felt an echoing wave of fury pour out from him. He wasn’t injured, but he was enraged.

“He’s angry,” she whispered, feet shifting in the mud as she reached for her belt and the lightsaber hilt strapped to it. “He’s coming.”

Her eyes soon confirmed what her senses were already telling her, and he emerged from the shadows of a burning building not far from her hiding place. He was back to wearing his helmet, and it gleamed a dull and threatening red as he swung his head one way and then another, searching the area and trying to pinpoint her location.

“We need him to come this way,” Poe reminded her. “Let him feel you.”

She didn’t want to.

She didn’t want him to brush his mind against hers or for him to follow her into the small grove of umbrella trees. She didn’t want to hurt him, and she didn’t want to lie to him.

Because beneath the helmet and the hurt and the misunderstandings…he was Ben.

And somewhere inside her she understood what that meant. It meant he was hers and she was his, even if they hadn’t decided yet what that would mean for them. They were circling each other, tugging and pulling as they tried to decide whose side to be on, but in her heart she knew one thing was absolutely unavoidable.

They would be together and the inevitable draw of purpose between them didn’t care which side they were on when it happened.

“Rey,” Finn hissed.

She dropped her shields, only a fraction but enough for him to really feel her, to connect with the breathless awe and mindless terror that she felt as she looked at him and he turned his head and looked right at the exact spot where she was sitting.

He couldn’t see her, she knew that, not even with the help of the flames brightening her surroundings. She was too far away and tucked too deep in shadow.

She still felt the impact of his gaze, the breath knocked out her chest like she’d taken a bad fall inside a sand covered ship on Jakku. Her lips parted, working wordlessly, but she didn’t even have the air left in her lungs to break the silence.

In seconds, he was crossing the distance between them, unheeding of the muddy marsh waters or the masked reinforcements in black that struggled along in his wake. The small crack in her mental shields was enough for her to feel the subtle nuance in his emotions that hadn’t been available to her until his consciousness hit her own like the battering ram cannon that they’d used on Crait.

He was coming for her.

Not because of what happened with Snoke or because she’d broken his family’s lightsaber, not because she had sided with the Resistance and had left with them to oppose his rule.

He was coming for her because he wanted her.

At his side.

On his throne.

In his bed.

“Run,” she said quietly, her voice finally freed as she tore her gaze away from Ben and scrambled to her feet.

“You know what to do,” Poe reminded her as they prepared to head back to the _Falcon_ and wait for her. “We’re counting on you.”

She didn’t answer, refused to waste the precious seconds required to even nod or grunt. Her feet slid in the wet earth and the effort to stay upright as she turned to run had her stomach flipping in terror.

He was so fast, so much faster than she’d anticipated, and she suddenly wasn’t sure that she’d be able to stay ahead of him long enough to entice him out of sight of the First Order. She needed to get him away from the stormtroopers, away from those black masked abominations, away from anyone that would try to stop her from doing what she had to do.

She’d barely penetrated the grove of trees deeply enough to conceal the space port from view when she heard the sound of his footsteps gaining on her. Even in boots and cape he was practically flying over the ground, using the Force and bending it to his will as it pushed him closer to her.

Her breath was coming in hot desperate gasps and her heart was pounding with fear and effort, but she knew it had to be now because even over all of that she could hear his ragged breathing as he closed the distance between them.

He was close.

So close.

She turned, feet sliding as she tried to brace herself for the impact of his body. He hit her hard, unable to stop in time to prevent it. They both hit the ground hard and Rey tasted blood on her tongue as she rolled away from him and scrambled to her feet.

She had seconds, maybe less, before he recovered from his surprise. If he managed to get to his feet, the plan had failed, because she would never be able to do what she needed to before his backup caught up to him.

He was already moving, struggling to find his footing, his heavy cape and boots a disadvantage now that they were drenched and mud coated.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, closing her eyes as she brought the hilt of her saber down across the back of his skull with a sickening crack. He fell again, and this time he didn’t stir.

She could still feel the steady hum of his life in the Force, so she knew she hadn’t him hard enough to kill him, though she supposed they’d have to have a droid look over him to see what other damage she might have done.

That, however, would be a concern for another time.

She curled her mind around him, using the Force to lift him since she knew her body wouldn’t be able to and tucking his saber safely away inside her clothes. She could hear more footsteps now and knew she had to hurry if she was going to be able to get him out of here and off the planet before the First Order figured out what was happening.

Finn and Poe were waiting just beyond the tree line with the _Falcon_ and she covered the distance as quickly as she was able, pulling him along behind her as she ran.

Relief broke out across their faces when she emerged from the trees.

“Any problems?” Finn asked as she passed him on the entrance ramp. Poe had already run inside to prep for takeoff, and Finn closed the door behind her once she and her captive were safely inside.

“They’re right behind us,” she panted. “We have to go now.”

“Got it,” he said, and turned away to sprint up the _Falcon’s_ narrow passageway to help Poe in the cockpit. His eyes barely drifted over Ben’s prone form as he went, and she knew he was trusting her to keep them safe and make sure Ben stayed unconscious until the right time.

She took Ben to the bed they’d prepared for him in the cargo hold and laid him down, muddy cloak and all, on the thin bedding that was the only cushion between him and the cold floor of the ship. He looked peaceful, almost as if he were sleeping and she brushed a stray piece of dark hair away from his eyes as she pushed down her guilt.

At what she was doing to him now and what she would be doing to him once he woke up.

She curled her legs and sat beside him as she felt the _Falcon_ make the jump to hyperspace. There were no alarms, no loud warning buzzes, or frantic flashes of light. They weren’t being followed, which meant that they’d slipped out from under the nose of the First Order with the Supreme Leader in hand.

Rey pressed a hand to her mouth, the taste of sweat and mud and barely restrained nausea filling her senses as she struggled to take deep calming breaths.

That had been the easy part.

***

Leia oversaw everything once they arrived back on Ajan Kloss.

Rey expected her to spend at least a few moments lingering in quiet over her son now that she was able to see the man he had grown into, but she was brisk and all business as she issued quiet orders.

He was scanned by a medical droid that declared him healthy and dosed him with a sedative from a sharp syringe to keep him unconscious as the small group of Leia’s most trusted confidants stripped him down to his skin, bathed away the mud, and replaced his clothing with a pair of dark brown pants and a loose fitting, Resistance issued, brown button-down shirt.

Rey thought he looked ridiculous, stifling a giggle at the absurdity of his stern face and ink black hair in such unassuming and humble clothing. He looked like he might pass as an angry mechanic or a maintenance worker.

Either way, there was something about it that made him seem smaller, weaker…diminished.

She said nothing when Leia took his helmet in her hands and turned it over and around, examining the metal and the angry red lines that crisscrossed the surface.

“Have it destroyed,” she ordered Threepio, handing it off to the attentive droid and turning her face away. “Kylo Ren is dead. My son has no choice.”

Rey swallowed hard and tucked his saber deeper into the folds of her white tunic.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is story is going to be gloriously fun to write and I hope you all enjoy the slow dance to the dark side! Reminder that tags are going to be subject to update as the story progresses and the chapter count is just a guess (knowing me it will probably be more, but I can't say for sure yet) Hope you enjoy!

The first thing that he became aware of as he drifted back toward consciousness was the persistent sound of water dripping.

It irritated him, the ceaseless repetition of it, but worse than that it meant that something was terribly wrong. Water wasn’t allowed to drip away wastefully on a First Order ship. There were too many droids and too much maintenance always being done to allow for that.

His mind was foggy and his eyelids too heavy for him to open them, but he took a deep breath through his nose and it confirmed his suspicions. Gone was the customary scent of recycled air and cold durasteel—in their place was the smell of damp earth and abundant plant life.

He wasn’t on a First Order ship and he couldn’t begin to piece together where he was or how he had come to be there. The last thing he remembered was hovering over a worthless Mid Rim planet, looking for intelligence about the Resistance…no that wasn’t quite right. Looking for the person that had been involved in passing along intelligence…

Rey.

He’d been looking for Rey.

And he’d found her, if the short and bright flashes of memory that followed were any indication. She’d run from him again, her eyes wide and frightened in the light of a roaring fire. He’d chased her into the trees, leaving Vicrul and the others far behind as he’d run after her. He’d been so close to her, closer than he’d been since she’d refused to take his hand on the  _ Supremacy _ , and he’d nearly been able to taste his victory, his fingertips seconds from reaching her skin. He’d been so hungry, so desperate for the feel of her, so wrapped up in the connection of their minds that he’d been unable to think about anything else or realize how dangerous it was to leave all of his protection behind like that.

He remembered crashing into her, tumbling over her in a tangle of limbs, and then everything had gone black.

It seemed likely that she had something to do with him ending up here—wherever  _ here _ was—instead of on his ship where he belonged. He forced his eyes open, squinting against the faint light streaming into the tent that shielded him from the sky above and the steady rain that pattered on the canvas.

At first glance it seemed that his tent was mostly empty—just the cot he was lying on, some outdated medical equipment, and an old desk—but a tug in the Force caught his attention. It was soft, almost imperceptible in its dormant state, but intimately familiar.

He peered deeper into the shadows and spotted Rey, sleeping peacefully in an old chair with her head resting on the pillow she had made from her folded arms on the desktop.

He looked around the tent again, but there were no guards, no locks, nothing at all to keep him from snatching her up and dragging her back to the First Order where she belonged. He’d keep her safe, happy, comfortable…not living in dirt and surviving off half rations of portions the way he was sure his mother had her living now.

She deserved better than that. Better than being the token Jedi of the Resistance. He just needed time to make her see that, to make her understand.

Need—pure and undiluted lust that mingled terrifyingly with the urge to possess—ran through his veins and pooled in the hole that darkness had carved out of his chest. The place where his heart had once been, where he’d kept all of his love for his father, his mother, even his Uncle Luke. All of that tenderness was gone now, burned away by rage and betrayal. The girl was all that remained, and his want of her, dark and sticky like black tar, was all that he had left of his humanity.

He felt her stir, her head lifting as she reacted to his emotions as they flooded into her through the bond. He snapped the connection shut, blocking her out as much as he was able to before she could get a good sense of his intentions.

It was best that she didn’t know that he planned to burn the whole place to the ground—his traitorous bitch of a mother included—and if Rey had any idea what he wanted to do with her specifically, she’d just run from him again. 

No, best to keep the bond closed for now, even if it deprived him of the soft taste of her confused feelings, something he got only a hint of as she raised her head and looked around the room with a confused twist of her lips and worried wrinkle in her brow.

There was fear there, in that little taste, but also longing. She had felt him and despite her stubborn insistence that she wanted nothing to do with him, he had no doubt that under her stubbornness and her pride that she was fighting a war against herself and the desires she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put a name to.

Her eyes locked onto his and she froze, muscled poised and tense as she stared back at him. Prepared to run, prepared to fight, mouth slightly parted on jerky breaths before the tip of her pink tongue darted out to cautiously wet the soft curve of her lips.

“Ben?”

He hated that name, the reminder of his past and the things that she expected him to be, things he could never ever go back to, but he didn’t respond or correct her. He waited, closed mouthed and watchful, to see what she’d do. He needed her to get closer without alarming her if he was going to steal her away from here without causing too much noise or drawing too much attention. He should have moved more quickly, gotten to her while she was still sleeping, but it was too late now.

She stood up carefully, wincing a little on what he assumed were sore muscles from sitting too long in an uncomfortable vigil, and walked closer.

“You’re awake,” she observed, her lips curving up at the corners in what could almost have been called a smile if it didn’t look so forced on her pretty face. “I’m glad.”

“Are you?” he asked, surveying the room again as she realized that she had neither a lightsaber nor a blaster strapped to her hip. He knew they would have taken his, an act they would pay dearly for, but he was surprised and disappointed to see her unarmed. It would make escaping with her that much more difficult if he had no weapon to fight his way out.

“Of course,” she said, drawing his attention back to her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

His hand twitched as she sat down in a chair beside his bed. She was close enough for him to touch her, grab her, but he needed a weapon because it was likely he’d only get one chance at this. He’d need to wait for the right time, the best moment to strike. So, his hand twitched, but he didn’t reach for her. He pinned her with his gaze instead, holding her motionless with the intensity of it.

“You’re not afraid of what I’m going to do to you? To all of you? Now that you’ve brought me here?”

“Ben, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, tipping her head to look at him before pressing a hand to his forehead. “You’re not running a fever but you’re acting very strangely. The doctor said you might be confused when you woke up, that it’s normal with a head injury, but maybe I should go and get her.”

“Head injury? You mean when you hit me over the head with a lightsaber and carried me off to some Force forsaken backwater hellplanet? Where am I anyway?” He’d need to know so he could pass the coordinates on to Hux and have the entire planet obliterated at the first available opportunity.

“Hit you…Ben that was months ago. Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what? That’s the last thing I remember.”

“You don’t remember being here? Helping us with the First Order? You don’t remember me…or  _ us _ ?”

“I’m not a traitor,” he began, rage creeping through the cracks of his pretend calm, but he stuttered to a stop, his mind catching up to the last of what she’d said. “Us?”

“Us,” she said again, her fingers locking around his and pulling their joined hands into her lap.

“There is no us,” he said sharply. “You were running from me and…”

“I was running from Kylo Ren,” she interrupted. “Not you. I would never run from Ben Solo.” She punctuated her declaration by leaning forward and placing a quick and hesitant kiss to the corner of his mouth as he sat frozen and stunned against his pillows. “You just hit your head and forgot, that’s all. The doctor said it might happen. The memories should come back to you, but if they don’t…Well, if they don’t it’s okay. We’ll make new memories… _ together _ .”

He settled back on the bed, watching her as she gave him a tense and encouraging smile with the lips that she’d just touched his face with.

He’d had years of training to conceal his thoughts and emotions, first from Luke and then Snoke. He could shield himself from her in the bond if he tried hard enough, as he was doing now. She wouldn’t be able to sense the emotions bubbling inside him if he didn’t allow it.

The little training that she’d done with Leia had not been enough to provide her with the same level of privacy and he knew now that he had more options than he’d originally assumed when he’d woken up.

He actually had  _ two _ choices- he could leave now and kill as many people as possible on the way out, as he’d originally planned, or he could stay here and wait. He could be patient and see what he could gain from whatever wild plan that the Resistance had apparently concocted.

Because he was now sure of only one thing.

Rey was lying to him.

He tightened his grip on her hand and stroked her wrist with his thumb, watching with veiled amusement as she shivered under her his touch. “I don’t remember any of that, but if you say it’s true, then...” He let the implication hang until her guilt swam across the bond, thick and sweet. “You’d never lie to me would you, Rey?”

“No,” she lied, biting down on her bottom lip until a small stain of red spread from the edges of her perfect white teeth. “I’d never lie to you, Ben.”

“No,” he agreed. “That doesn’t sound like something you’d ever want to do. You’re too good for that, too sweet.” That was true, he knew, and he chose his words carefully so that while the implications that she drew from what he said might be inaccurate, his actual words were never an outright lie. It would be important later, when he had wrapped her up tight in a web of her own dishonesty.

Rey would never want to lie to him, but she had been in his mother’s company for far too long and no matter what the rest of the Resistance or the New Republic believed about Leia Organa, she was every bit of Darth Vader’s daughter. The ends always justified the means, as long as it was your side that was committing the atrocities.

The hypocrisy of it never quite registered with Leia, she was too close to it to see it, but he had always known.

“You’re a good person, Ben. I’ll help you remember that.”

He smiled at her, as soft and welcoming as he could manage as he pushed down his greed. It was hard to wait, but if he could convince her to come to him, to leave with him willingly…well that was better than taking her by force. He wouldn’t have to deal with her anger and resentment then.

He’d never been good at manipulation, his emotions were always too close to the surface, but he’d never wanted anything as much as he wanted her and it was a good incentive to try and actually learn something from the dark siders who had come before him.

Hadn’t he been forced to listen again and again to the tale of Palpatine’s treachery and how it had turned Anakin to the dark? And he’d seen it himself with Snoke, though he hadn’t realized it until it was too late.

She was going to have to be close to him if she was hoping to convince him that he’d changed, that he’d been with her and the Resistance willingly. He could use that to his advantage, sow the seeds of doubt and discord, fan the flames of her resentment against his mother and whoever else had put her up to this lie.

“I may not remember being with the Resistance,” he said carefully, “but I know I’m meant to be with you. You know that…Don’t you, Rey? You can feel that we’re supposed to be together?”

She took a deep breath, her body trembling despite the smothering jungle heat. “I do know that,” she admitted quietly.

He smiled at her again and let a little of his pleasure slip through into the bond, a reward that brought a flush of pink to her freckled cheeks.

This time, she wasn’t lying.

***

“Well? How’d it go?”

“Do you think he was suspicious?”

“It doesn’t look like he hurt you, so that’s something, right?”

Rey pressed a hand to her aching head, the throbbing growing worse under the constant barrage of questions she’d endured since she’d walked into Leia’s makeshift bedroom and closed the door behind her.

“Let her speak,” Leia said, interrupting the chorus of questions from the others and settling the room into expectant silence.

“He didn’t hurt me,” Rey said, running her tongue over the marks her teeth had carved into her bottom lip. “He was just confused.”

“And you told him that he’d been here with us? Helping us?” Leia’s eyes were keen and locked onto Rey’s face, looking for clues.

“I told him,” Rey said, unable to make her voice sound anything but flat and resigned. She’d argued with them for the last eight weeks as Ben remained in a deep sleep, sedated into nothingness by the regular meds given to him by an emotionless droid. It had all come to nothing—their minds were immovable on the subject. “And I told him that we were together, just like you asked me to.”

“How did he react to that?”

Rey shrugged, refusing to look Leia in the eye. “He was confused, as I said. Angry at first but then…”

“He calmed down because of you,” Leia said, triumphant. “I knew he would.”

“He said he trusted me, even if he couldn’t remember what happened.” The edge of bitterness cut through the hot and humid air, but Leia ignored it.

“Of course he trusts you,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “That’s why it works.”

“He thinks we’re together now,” Rey pointed out. “I held his hand. I kissed his cheek.”

“Just like you were supposed to do,” Leia reminded her. “We are all going to go along with it and pretend that it’s perfectly normal. He’ll never know the difference and you only have to keep up the pretense until the war is over.”

“He doesn’t suspect anything?” Poe asked, leaning forward in his seat to look directly at Rey, his expression skeptical.

“I can feel him in the Force,” Rey said, bristling under Poe’s stare. “I don’t feel anything but confusion and…” She stopped, shaking her head and refusing to finish it. It was bad enough that she was in his head and she wouldn’t make that worse by sharing everything she found there with people that hated him.

“He wants you,” Leia said, finishing the thought that Rey had abandoned. “It will keep him busy while we work on freeing the galaxy from the First Order.”

Rey nodded, short and sharp. “He was asleep again when I left him. I should be there when he wakes up.”

Leia pursed her lips, her finger tapping a restless beat against the tabletop. “You can manage him, can’t you? You feel…restless, unsettled.”

“I can manage him,” Rey said. “He won’t hurt me.”

“Are you sure?” Rose asked. She was watching Rey with a worried expression, though Rey thought it was a bit too late to be having second thoughts now.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I’ve never worried that he’d hurt me, only that he’d hurt all of you.” She kept her mouth shut about the things she did worry he’d do to her. The things she’d let him do, no matter the consequences. She could still feel the path his thumb had traveled across her wrist and if the people in this room had their way, she’d have to let him do much more than that. It amazed her that they didn’t understand the risk they were taking, how deep the temptation went. Were they truly that oblivious? Or that determined not to see it?

“I guess it’s a good thing that we have you to keep us safe from him, then, isn’t it?”

Rey didn’t bother to answer that, wasn’t sure she could around the hysterical laughter clawing its way up her throat. She just nodded silently, turning back to the door with a knot of dread in her stomach.

“Rey?”

She stopped at Leia’s questioning tone, somehow still a command even in its softness.

“Yes?”

“See if you can get him talking about the First Order, hmm? I know he has to think that he’s already told us everything useful already if the plan is going to work, but I’m sure you can draw out some details in casual conversation, can’t you?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The door clicked softly behind her on her way out.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A gentle reminder for everyone (myself included) that 5 chapters is only an estimate and this maybe, possibly, probably will be longer than that. Oops.

Kylo spent his first several conscious days on Ajan Kloss confined to his bed and the next several days after that confined to his tent. He was isolated and alone, too weak to leave on his own and too restless to sleep. It gave him ample time to think, to plot, to plan and scheme all of the ways that he might use this ridiculous deception against them all.

When his chance came, he’d be ready.

Rey was the only person that came in and out, citing Leia’s overall business with her duties as a Resistance general as the reason for her absence and merely quirking a brow at him when he’d reminded her that Leia had never bothered to see to him or his injuries herself.

But surely, she’d know that already? She’d seen it herself in the months that he’d been here?

It had been hard to hide his smile when she’d shrugged, irritation and resentment toward Leia over her forced deception slipping to him through the bond, dark and rich and promising.

That resentment, paired with feelings she refused to acknowledge she had toward him, were the key to winning her over. They were her weakness, the most easily exploitable chinks in her emotional armor.

By the time he stepped out of the tent at her side, his eyes scanning the riotous jungle undergrowth and the bustling business of the Resistance base, he had a good idea of what he would need to do.

She’d been carefully solicitous of him while he’d been trapped in the tent, caring for him while maintaining a distance that he hadn’t pushed against, claiming that she was trying to give him time to heal. He’d wanted her to trust him, to have faith that their little lie had worked before he started pushing against her defenses.

He’d let her keep her space, maintained a professional distance, until the woman that stood beside him outside his tent, carefully watching his face for any reaction, was almost relaxed. She had no reservations, no suspicions that he was onto them at all.

He sighed dramatically and pushed a hand through his hair. “I still don’t remember any of this.”

“That’s okay,” she said, a fake smile pasted on her face. “The doctor said it might take time for your memories to come back.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” Her voice was hard and brittle, uneasy with the deception. Every time she was forced to tell him another lie, her discomfort increased and her resentment grew.

_ Step One- Get her to lie to him as often as possible _

“Hmm,” he hummed, looking around curiously and trying to ignore the terrified glances of the people who rushed by. “Maybe if we walked around it would trigger my memory? What was my favorite place on base? Where was my bunk?” He turned to face her, crowding into her space slightly, probing her with questions for the first time. “The first place I kissed you?”

“Ah,” she said, swimming in guilt as she glanced around and avoided his eyes. “We were taking it slowly, you know? It took time after you came here for me to trust you and you didn’t want to rush things.”

“I see.” He tipped his head to look at her curiously, trailing his fingertips softly across her wrist and watching her struggle not to jerk her hand away as she fought an internal battle against herself over the web of deceit she was crafting.

The more intimate he could get her to be, the worse the guilt would become.

_ Step Two- Tempt her body and seduce her mind _

“Will you still show me around, Rey?” he asked quietly, leaning down so that his lips nearly brushed the shell of her ear, his breath fanning out across her cheekbone. “I don’t think I can stand to be here right now without you beside me.”

“Of course,” she said, swallowing hard and taking a step back before gesturing with one hand that he should follow her as she walked off in the direction of the busiest part of the base.

He caught up to her with a few long strides and wrapped his hand around hers. He pretended not to notice the way she trembled with uncertainty at the touch as he shot a predatory grin over her shoulder to anyone he caught looking in their direction.

They all startled and scattered out of his path, ducking their heads and avoiding his eyes as they scrambled to get away from him. The Force spiked with their tumultuous emotions, letting him know in seconds that Rey was not the only one that had reservations about whatever plan had been devised for bringing him here. The Resistance had clearly not only not learned to love him in the time he had been here, but they also obviously weren’t accustomed to seeing his face at all. Leia had overestimated the abilities of her people to hide their discomfort.

Good.

Let them fear him, it would force Rey into a protective role and that could only aid him in turning her against them…or them against her. If they saw her with him often enough and could observe for themselves how strongly she was drawn to him, then they might just learn to fear her, too. Whichever way the split between them happened was fine with him.

_ Step 3- Divide and conquer _

That much he had learned from Snoke and learned well. Separate the target from the things that they loved, the things that gave them hope and they would topple right into your hands.

He listened attentively as she tugged him along behind her, mentally cataloging the layout of the base, the number of available ships and munitions, the size their pieced together army, and what seemed like the most likely places for them to be concealing communications tech or intelligence.

If Rey’s estimates were to be believed, he’d been in Ajan Kloss for just a little over two standard months. Enough time for Hux to have taken significant strides toward deposing him if he’d been able to pull together enough support from within the First Order.

This unplanned absence had made Kylo’s position as Supreme Leader unexpectedly tenuous and the sooner he was able to make contact with his own armies, the easier it would be for him to return without having to stage another successful overthrow. His rise to power had been based on lucky opportunity and if Hux had made his move, it would have been to take advantage of his own disappearance in a similar way. That was much easier to do than to plan and plot and create the weakness that was needed in your opponent.

If he had been incredibly fortunate, Hux would have decided to wait a little longer for fear of inciting panic in the ranks at another change of power so quickly after the death of Snoke. If he believed Kylo dead, then he may have been content to issue orders in his name until a suitable amount of time had passed. If that was the case, then it would make it infinitely simpler for Kylo to return and simply step back into his role without much fuss.

There was very little to be lost and much to be gained, since he didn’t intend to return without Rey by his side, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he was able to make contact with the First Order and see what Hux had done in the time he’d been missing.

As it turned out, he need not have worried about finding the communications room on base, since Rey led him to it directly as she showed him around the base. It was clear that she was proud of the base—it was obviously a home to her—and that she’d been ordered to hold nothing back from him for fear of raising his suspicions.

He held back his excitement so that it wouldn’t reach her through the bond, allowing only interest and polite curiosity about the comms room to slip through. He’d been practicing since he’d realized how important controlling the flow of his emotions would be and over the past few weeks their bond had become something different.

Thoughts and emotions no longer raced between them unchecked. Now, the bond was a membrane, semipermeable and bent to his will.

Everything from Rey came to him without effort or resistance. He felt even the most minor shift in her moods, from her nervous uncertainty when he touched her to the irritation she felt when someone frowned in his direction. Her response to her own lies was especially telling, as was her rising desire whenever she let him close to her.

Information from his side of the bond was now tightly restricted, with only the things that he specifically allowed being able to pass through. She felt his desire for her, his unease and confusion at what he saw on base, his reservations about seeing his mother…all the things she would expect to feel. She didn’t feel any of his amusement at the lies she told him or the rage that was coiled in his gut whenever he contemplated the sheer audacity of what Leia had done to him. She didn’t feel his resolve to make them pay for what they’d done, or the possessiveness that he felt for her.

None of the things that might make her suspicious, concerned, or frightened were allowed to pass through for her to become aware of them.

She kept him to herself for all of that first day, not even taking him to eat until the large tent that housed the kitchen and dining area was mostly empty. They passed a small group of people that he assumed were friends of hers as they entered that were on their way out, his pulse jumping quickly when he recognized FN-2187 among them, but despite the joy and relief she felt when they waved in her direction she didn’t linger.

They ate alone at a table in the corner, with her keeping a close eye on him as he once again tried to choke down the pitiful meal they gave him as she inhaled hers like she hadn’t eaten in months. She didn’t even bother to ask anymore if she could have whatever was left on his tray, since he’d been giving her his uneaten portion since he’d woken up in their leaky medical tent.

He was used to going without meals on missions, and years of careful discipline and meditation had helped his body thrive during brief periods of lean supplies but having access to his leftovers had put a rosy pink flush on Rey’s skin and her cheeks had filled in enough to look well-fed and healthy.

“Are you okay?”

He looked up quickly to find Rey staring at him over the bite of stale bread in her hand. Her head was tipped to the side and there was a worried crease in the smooth skin of her forehead.

He bit back the lie that flew to his lips, resisting the urge to tell her that he was fine or just tired. He had to be impeccably honest with her technically, even if he wasn’t forthcoming with his thoughts and intentions.

“Why do you ask?” he said instead, withdrawing and tightening his mental shields as she probed gently at his mind.

“You looked…angry,” she said after a moment, her mouth pursed around the confusion she felt. He looked angry, but she didn’t feel the anger that he’d stored away on his side of the bond about his mother letting her go hungry.

“I was thinking about my mother,” he said after a moment, carefully constructing his honesty to suit his own purposes. “I don’t want to upset you by having negative thoughts about Leia and I know you can sense them so…”

“Oh,” she said, nodding slightly. “Leia taught me to do some of that, too. Mental shielding, right?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Snoke taught me.”

She was watching him now, trying to gauge how much he might have been concealing from her since he’d finally regained consciousness. After a tense moment of silence she shrugged, apparently deciding that even if he happened to be hiding something from her that she couldn’t pry too much without him questioning her own mental defenses.

She didn’t want him probing around the flimsy walls she’d put up around her own deceptions and was plainly as eager to let the matter drop as he was.

“So, I won’t be taking you back to the tent you were in before,” she said, taking another bite of bread and changing the subject.

“No?”

“We need it for other patients,” she explained. “You’ll have to bunk somewhere else.”

“Where did I sleep before?” He didn’t point out the obvious—that none of the places she’d shown him today had been his own sleeping quarters. He had no bunk here, no personal items stored.

“We gave someone else that bunk while you were unconscious,” she said quickly. “We’re just so short on space for everyone right now. But a new bunk just opened up in Poe’s room and…”

“No,” he said, shaking his head before she could even finish the thought. “I am not bunking with Dameron. I don’t even remember being here for the past two months! How do I know he isn’t going to try and kill me in my sleep?”

“Really, Ben, don’t be ridiculous why would someone that you know, someone that you’ve trusted for months, try to kill you in your…” She stopped suddenly, her newfound color draining away as she stared him in silent horror. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot about what happened with Lu…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he interrupted, rolling his shoulders in a dismissive shrug as he let the old familiar hurt seep into her through the bond.

“You don’t have to bunk with Dameron,” she said, and he didn’t interrupt her thoughts as she spent several long minutes tapping one delicate finger against the tabletop. When she spoke, her voice was clear and certain, protective. “You can bunk with me, instead.”

“What about your bunkmates?” he asked, making a show of considering the other person’s feelings about his presence in Rey’s bedroom. “Won’t they object?”

“I’m assigned to Rose, and she doesn’t spend much of her time in her own bed these days.”

“Will I sleep in her empty bunk or in yours with you?”

“We’ll work out a bed of your own tomorrow, for tonight you’ll have to bunk with me.” Her voice was considerably less certain at that thought, but he’d known she wouldn’t want to ask Rose if he could sleep in her bed.

He let his smile spread, slow and teasing. “I thought you said we were taking things slowly? Shouldn’t you at least let me kiss you before I get to sleep in your bunk?”

She blushed, her face and neck turning crimson as she turned her face away on a cough to cover her surprise. “Maybe,” she said when she turned back to him, but the note of flirtation in her voice was forced and he knew that she was fighting herself. Her instructions meant she would have to do whatever it took to keep him happy and believing the lies she was telling him but getting too close to him put her at risk of falling into temptation herself.

She remained tense and on edge as she finished her dinner and all throughout the short walk back to the small tent that she shared with Rose.

He took in the cluttered interior as she stood off to the side, nibbling nervously on a thumbnail. It was cluttered, what little room they had was filled to overflowing with just two small trunks that he assumed held their clothing and work supplies, a scattering of personal items, and two cots. Rey’s bed was barely big enough for both of them if they slept on their sides with no space between them.

He wanted to rail against it, to ask her how she lived like this when he’d offered her everything, to find his mother and scream at her about what she’d done to him and to Rey…but he breathed steadily through his nose and until he was calm. He’d have her wrapped in luxury soon enough, and for now she was standing beside him, her hand still wrapped in his, willing to share a small cot with him even though it meant spending a full night with her body pressed against him.

It was progress and he needed to be patient or risk ruining it all.

He went over the steps again in his mind, a manta to protect him against impulsiveness. Dark side power was about giving in to your passions, but he was discovering that a little restraint now, meant greater rewards in time. 

“It’s not much,” she said, interrupting his thoughts as she watched him look over her meager belongings.

“It’s where you are,” he said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

She flushed again, warm pride and affection rushing out of her end of the bond. He made a mental note that she was more than just lonely, more than just touch starved. She was as susceptible to praise and affection as he had always been. That would make it easier because he didn’t have to try not to lie or construct carefully manipulated sentences to make her feel wanted.

He wanted her, needed her, in the most way that he knew how. All he had to do to make her happy was tell her the truth.

There was a sudden chatter of voices from just outside the tent and she left him inside to wander around as she stepped out and spoke to whoever was out there in rushed words and hushed voices.

“You can’t be serious,” said another woman’s voice in response, too loud and clear enough even through the tent. “Rey, it isn’t safe.”

“Shh, he’ll hear you,” Rey hissed back. There was a shuffle of feet and they moved further away from the tent, taking their conversation out of earshot as he shook his head. He would never understand how Leia had believed that any of them were capable of perpetuating a lie of this magnitude.

It would have been painful to watch them try, if it hadn’t been so ridiculously funny.

She eyed him carefully when she slipped back into the tent a few minutes later and he kept his face composed into an expression of polite disinterest.

“She’s not sleeping here tonight, then?” he asked.

“No, she usually doesn’t, remember?”

“Right,” he agreed, walking toward her slowly, watching her face carefully as he went. He knew the exact moment that she realized that Rose wasn’t coming back, that realization followed swiftly by her figuring out his intentions, and could feel her struggling with the urge to flee. “You said you might let me kiss you before we spent the night together, right?”

“I did say that,” she admitted as she fidgeted under his gaze. “Do you  _ want _ to kiss me?”

“I’ve always wanted to kiss you,” he said as he came to a stop just in front of her, forcing her to look up to continue meeting his eyes. “I’m glad I didn’t kiss you before. I want us both to remember the first time you kiss me, Rey.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a slightly shorter chapter but the news is not all bad since my new estimate for the chapter count has moved us from 5 to 8. My greatest feat of magic in my writing is that the more chapters I write the farther I get from being finished lol
> 
> This is really the only story I can concentrate on right now so if you are also reading any of my other stuff I promise I will update them as soon as the muse returns!

Her heart was beating wildly in her throat as he skimmed his hand up her neck and over her jaw. He could see her struggle as she tried and failed to keep her face impassive and her breathing even, but there was no way for her to conceal her nerves.

He passed his thumb over her lip, tugging it down gently to loosen the stiff muscles of her face and get her to relax into his touch. There was a flash of guilt in the bond, but he wasn’t sure if it had come from him because of what he was doing to her or from her because of the lies she’d told that had put her within his grasp. It was gone as quickly as it had arrived, smothered and carried away on the rising tide of anticipation as he dipped his head toward her.

It would have been the easiest thing in the galaxy for him to lower his mouth to hers, to settle his lips over the lush pink swell of hers and let the sensation drown him, but he paused a hairbreadth away and hovered so close that he could feel her breath and the warmth of her skin on his face.

Her eyes had fluttered closed and he watched her face as her brows drew together in confusion. She knew how close he was, and she wanted him to close the gap, but easy wouldn’t bring her any closer to where he needed her to be.

He wanted to kiss her, but more than that, he wanted her to know how badly she wanted to be kissed.

So he waited…calmly…patiently…until her need got the best of her and she lifted herself up slightly on her toes and sealed her mouth to his.

The darkness inside him surged to the surface, greed snapping at the end of its chain as her smell the soft caress of her skin assaulted his senses. He battled with it, pushing it down as she hesitated and then pulled him closer, her fingers sinking into his hair as she whimpered slightly and pressed her chest against his.

He traced the seam of her mouth with the tip of his tongue, swooping inside when she opened her lips in surprise. Shock jolted through her, through the bond, but she didn’t pull away as he tasted the sweet flavor of her for the first time.

The kiss was awkward, fumbling, an exchange of too much tongue and then not enough before they settled into a comfortable rhythm that had desire and confusion spiking out from her in the bond. He kissed her until the desire won out, until all traces of worry and guilt had faded from her mind, and then he stepped back and let her go.

“Ben?” Her lips were swollen and her cheeks hot as she stared up at him in hurt bewilderment.

“We’re taking it slowly,” he reminded her, cupping her cheek and pressing one more quick kiss to her mouth. “I don’t want you to regret anything that you do with me or to feel like I made you do something you weren’t comfortable with.”

He wanted her to spend the night aching for his touch and to remember that he had given her a choice where Leia had denied her one and he knew that he had been right about her reaction to his words when Rey’s nostrils flared and irritation spilled out into the bond.

“Thank you,” she told him, tipping her head so that her cheek rested in the curve of his palm.

“Let’s go to bed,” he urged, and he didn’t miss the flash of interest in her eyes as she turned away from him. He’d known that they were connected, had felt the bond, but being so close to her and being able to see how much effort she was putting into resisting him gave him more hope than anything else he’d experienced between them.

He’d touched her across a galaxy, and it had meant less than the longing he’d just seen in her face.

She crawled into the bunk and curled up on her side with her back facing the tent wall and he followed her in, careful to keep his body on his own side and not crowd her. It wasn’t an easy task considering his size and he didn’t try to disguise his discomfort as she watched him struggle to get his full torso on the bed.

“It’s okay if you touch me,” she said quietly, issuing an invitation that quivered in the dark. “I know there’s not much room for you.”

He stretched out into her space, her heat pressing against his side as she shifted closer and placed her head on his chest. He smiled into her hair as she relaxed against him, pleased beyond his wildest imaginings at how quickly she’d thawed to him and how easy it was to lure her closer.

A wave of his hand and a small push of the Force was all it took for him to put her into a deep and undisturbable sleep. Her breathing was soft and even as he listened to the sound of the Resistance base outside the tent. It was already dark outside and within an hour almost all of the voices and sounds had faded away as everyone found their own beds, or those they would be sleeping in, for the night.

He slipped out from under Rey, careful to position her body in a comfortable position since she wouldn’t be moving at all until he returned, and crept to the door of the tent. A quick glance outside and a sweep of the surrounding area revealed nothing, and he darted through the shadows on his way to the communication room.

He passed a few secret lovers that had slipped from their tents to find one another under the cover of darkness and several of the guards that roamed the camp, but all were easily dealt with. A waved hand and a quickly muttered, “You didn’t see me,” was enough to have all of them staring blankly into the distance as he left them behind. 

The comm room was empty and silent, a surprise after so many years of living on First Order ships where operations ran during every cycle, but one he didn’t think about too deeply. The Resistance was a nuisance, passionate and stubborn, but undisciplined, unorganized, and highly outskilled by their opponent.

If it hadn’t been for his meddling mother and Rey, they would have all been dead months ago.

The equipment was old and protected by a primitive version of the security software that he was familiar with from his own ships, but after a few minutes of fiddling with it he was able to get a decent signal going. He bypassed the broader signals that might be picked up and answered by whoever was nearby and sent a message encoded with Hux’s private code and his own. Any ship that detected the signal would relay it until it reached whatever ship his arrogant general happened to be on and the message would arrive encrypted and protected from prying eyes.

“Ren?”

Hux answered almost immediately, his relieved voice breaking the silence of the comm room as the connection between them crackled to life.

“General,” Kylo answered cautiously. He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened during his absence or how pleased Hux and the rest of the Order would be that he wasn’t quite dead yet after all.

“Where have you been?” Hux hissed. “Do you have any idea how long you’ve been gone?”

“Not really,” Kylo answered honestly. “It seems I was unconscious for most of it.”

“Two standard months,” Hux replied. “You left with no word, no warning, no instructions. I hope you have an explanation for this.”

“I’ve been an extended guest of the Resistance,” Kylo said dryly. “Your obvious concern for my well-being is appreciated.”

He could hear Hux’s teeth grinding together from the other side of the galaxy.

“When are you coming back?”

“Do you want me back?” Kylo kept the surprise in his voice hidden but he had assumed that Hux would have spent the last few months doing everything he could to take over the First Order. This message had been intended to be more of a warning for Hux that he would be coming back to assume the role he’d lost than anything else.

“ _ Yes _ ,” Hux said quickly. “Two months and these horrible servants of yours haven’t left my side for a single moment. They said they’d feel it if you were dead and they didn’t, so you weren’t. I’ve told everyone that you’re off on some ridiculous mission but it’s getting hard to remain vague. People are asking questions.”

“Hmm,” Kylo mused, “sounds like I underestimated the loyalty of my knights.”

“What about  _ my  _ loyalty?”

“You’re very loyal,” Kylo agreed. “To yourself and to power. I’m sorry if my absence has inconvenienced you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with it for a little longer. I have something here that I need to work out.”

“And what, exactly, am I supposed to tell the rest of the Order?”

“That when I return, I will bring everything we need to defeat the Resistance. We’re going to wipe them out,” he promised. “Complete obliteration.”

“What makes you think you can do that when Snoke wasn’t able to?”

Kylo smiled at the doubt in Hux’s voice. “I have things that Snoke didn’t have. I have the location of the Resistance’s leadership and I will have the last Jedi.”

Hux sucked in a breath. “You’re going to kill the girl. The scavenger.”

“If I did, I would only make her a martyr for their cause,” Kylo explained. “By the time I’m done here they won’t want anything to do with her. I’m going to break their hope.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Hux said.

“I do,” Kylo promised. “And Hux?”

“Yes?”

“Say hello to Vicrul and the others for me?”

He cut the signal off in the middle of Hux’s angry swearing, chuckling to himself as he erased any evidence of their communication from the Resistance’s computer system.

He’d need to come back later and see what he could learn from their ancient computer logs about other bases and where they were getting their supplies and intelligence from, but for now he had done as much as he felt he could without risking discovery and he shut down the machines and made his way back across camp to Rey’s tent.

She was still sleeping deeply exactly as he’d left her, undisturbed and unaware that he’d ever left at all. He settled in beside her and waved a hand to let the unnatural sleep he’s placed on her mind dissipate, replaced with her own natural sleep cycles.

“Ben?”

She didn’t open her eyes, but she shifted toward him in her sleep, her face creased with worry as she reached an arm across his chest.

“I’m here,” he soothed, and she sighed, her body relaxing against him as she slipped back into a deeper sleep of her own making.

He fell asleep beside her after his mind finished working over his conversation with Hux and settled to wondering if anyone other than Rey had ever been comforted by his presence.

He woke to her climbing over the top of him, arms and legs a flurry of motion as she scrambled off him and popped her head out the tent door before he had even fully opened his eyes.

“ _ Kriff _ ,” she swore. “Get up Ben, we’re late.”

“Late?” The sliver of sky that he could see beyond her head was still the light and steely gray that meant the sun had yet to show its face above the horizon. “Late for what?”

“Training,” she said with a grin, kicking lightly at the bunk until he grumbled and climbed out.

Her mornings were apparently spent running obstacles on some sort of improvised training course, which he discovered when she forced him to run the Force forsaken thing before dawn. It seemed to have been designed to challenge her physically but also to be unfinishable without some assistance from the Force.

His mother’s design then.

“How did you finish it so quickly?” Rey grumbled, glaring at him with little real heat as she pouted.

“I know what I’m doing,” he reminded her. “I spent years training under Luke and then years more with Snoke. You’re powerful and you have good instincts but there are little tricks you can use to make it smoother, faster, more efficient.”

She shoved her staff into his hand and stepped into his space, obviously unbothered by the sweat on his brow or the surprise he was sure he was wearing on his face. “Show me,” she commanded.

He ran her through it again, showing her where to push and how to pull, where she could bend the Force and when to let it bend her.

When they finished, she had shattered her previous record for a personal best time and the smile on her face was brighter than he had ever seen it.

Taking advantage of the moment, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her until her lightsaber slipped from her hand onto the spongy forest floor and her fingers were tangled in his hair. There were no nerves this time, no hesitation from her when he slanted his mouth over hers. She opened her lips readily, her tongue seeking his with a desperate intensity that left him breathless and awed at the depths of the desire that she’d concealed from everyone, probably even herself.

She pressed her body against him, her breasts crushed against his chest, and he tightened his grip on her hips to hold her there until she finally pulled away.

“Ben, I—,” she stammered. Her cheeks were flushed, and her chest was rising and falling rapidly, but there were tears swimming in her eyes, threatening to fall as she shook her head at him.

“Rey?” he asked, frowning at her as she wiped her cheeks. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she said, taking a hesitating step toward him. “It isn’t you.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s just…” She swallowed hard and shook her head harder. “I’m just still getting used to…all of this. You not having your memories is hard, you know?”

The lie hung between them as she stared at him with her lip caught nervously between her teeth.

“It’s okay,” he said, pushing down the triumph he felt and letting only his concern for her trickle through the bond. “We’re going to do all of this at your pace.”

She nodded slowly and gave him a tense smile that returned with an encouraging ease as he reached for her hand. She let him take it and they picked up her fallen saber before heading back to the base for lunch.

Steps One and Two were going well, he decided. Lunch in the dining tent with the rest of the Resistance seemed like an excellent time to work on Step Three. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm having quite a bit of fun writing this and I want to thank everyone for the support and the wonderful comments. I appreciate all of you so much!

A flick of his finger was all that it took to send FN-2187’s lunch tray clattering to the ground. Kylo wasn’t gentle or subtle about the tug in the Force that yanked it from the other man’s hands—though he did wait until Rey was too preoccupied with her food to notice the ripple in the energy around her—and he shot his most infuriating smirk at the traitorous stormtrooper over her shoulder when he looked around in puzzlement.

“What the…”

Kylo leaned back and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender as FN-2187 charged across the dining tent with murder in his eyes and Rey whipped around to see what was causing all the noise and commotion. The other diners scattered as Kylo allowed himself to be lifted out of his seat by a pair of enraged hands gripping the front of his shirt.

“Finn!” Rey jumped to her feet, her chair flying back from the force of her movement as she scrambled around the table to intervene. “What are you doing?”

The stormtrooper gave him a hard shake that he did nothing to defend himself against. “This nerf herding…moof milking…I knew we couldn’t trus…”

“Finn,” Rey cut in desperately. “What are you talking about? What happened?”

“He knocked my tray out of my hand.” It was said through clenched teeth and Kylo resisted the urge to smile at him again. He’d known what a great target  _ Finn _ would be, because this particular friend of Rey’s was the one that had the most reason to hate him. Provoking an emotional outburst from someone with this much anger inside him was so easy that it was almost laughable.

That was another thing that he’d learned from Snoke.

Kylo shot Rey a look, lifting his hands up higher to indicate his lack of interest in fighting. He wasn’t going to defend himself and she recognized it immediately, interpreting it as an indication of his innocence though those words had never left his lips.

“I’m sure he didn’t,” Rey said, gripping Finn’s arm and staring at her friend with a hard look until he let Kylo go. “He was with me the whole time.”

“Like that would stop him,” Finn retorted. “He was using the Force so you know I can’t trust him.”

“You can’t trust me because I know how to use the Force?” It wasn’t exactly Finn had said and Kylo knew that it wasn’t really what he had meant, but it wasn’t so much of a twist that it seemed unreasonable.

A flicker of doubt, quickly smothered, flared in Rey’s eyes and the bond was alive with vibrant spikes in her emotion.

“That’s not what I said,” Finn said bitterly. “But in your case, it’s true because you’re also a  _ liar _ .”

Rey stepped back as though Finn had slapped her, her gaze hardening on Finn’s face. The bond snapped closed as she sucked a breath in through her nose and Kylo realized abruptly that Finn’s inconsiderate words had played out in his favor better than he could ever have hoped for.

When she spoke, her voice was devoid of emotion but commanding. “Leave him alone.”

“Rey, you know what he is…” Finn trailed off as he got a good look at her face. “Rey?”

She ignored his words, shoving against him with her shoulder to grab Kylo by the hand and start dragging him from the tent, plowing through the onlooking crowd with a grumble. Even her other friends weren’t safe, both of them nearly knocked off their feet as she swept by them with a glare that was cold enough to silence their protests.

Kylo grinned at them all over his shoulder as he let himself be pulled along and the young woman crossed her arms over chest with a scowl.

They didn’t like what Rey had done or the way she’d behaved, and she resented them for Finn’s foolish slip of the tongue.

Good.

A wedge between her and the traitor was an excellent start. He could work on the others next, and then his mother.

***

“What happened?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rey was slumped mutinously in a chair in Leia’s bedchamber, watching the water drip down the walls in its inescapable pathways. She hated being here, in this claustrophobic little room with the dark rock walls, shifting restlessly as she refused to meet Leia’s gaze.

“With Finn,” Leia elaborated. “In the dining tent?”

“He attacked Ben,” Rey said, pressing her lips closed after the briefest explanation she could think of and refusing to offer anything more.

“He said…”

“I don’t  _ care _ what Finn said,” Rey cut in, bitter resentment and anger spilling out of her in a rush. “I don’t care what he said, and I don’t care what Ben may have, but  _ probably didn’t _ , do. There was no reason for Finn to do that.”

“He’s also been antagonizing Poe.”

“Poe?”

“He’s apparently been making very…provocative faces at him when he thinks you aren’t looking.”

“I don’t understand,” Rey said, crossing her arms and staring mutinously at Leia. “What kind of faces?”

“Possessive faces,” Leia said, an uncharacteristic flush heating her cheeks. “The kind that are distinctly sexual in nature….about you.”

“Well, what did you expect was going to happen?” Rey sighed and tossed her head back until she was staring blankly at the ceiling above their heads. “He thinks he’s my boyfriend!”

“Yes, he does.” Leia paused until Rey lifted her head up to meet her gaze. “ _ He _ thinks that, but  _ you  _ should remember otherwise.”

“I do remember,” Rey snapped. “With every lie I tell him I’m given another reminder.”

“You must separate yourself from whatever guilt you’re carrying about this,” Leia said. “I understand that it’s uncomfortable, but you have to be aware of what he’s doing so that you can control him. Your emotions can’t stand in the way of the greater good of the galaxy.”

Rey snorted, loud and unladylike, and the sound echoed in the small room. “Control my emotions? Like you did? And Luke?”

“What does Luke have to do with it?”

“Nothing,” Rey grumbled, trying to banish the imagine of Luke Skywalker’s face confessing to the murder he’s nearly committed from her mind. “He’s asked about you. Did you know that?”

“Luke?”

Rey rolled her eyes. “No, not Luke.  _ Ben _ . He’s asked about you and when you were planning to see him.”

“He thinks I’ve already seen him,” Leia said. “It wouldn’t make sense for us to have a big reunion if he’d been here for months.”

“You could have come to see him after his injury,” Rey said, her voice making clear the judgment that she couldn’t put into words. “If he thinks he’s lost months of his memory that would be pretty frightening.”

“We need him to depend on you,” Leia said. “Not on me.”

“I would want my mom,” Rey persisted, the admission sticking in her throat beside half remembered images of a woman’s face. “If I was in his place, and I was alone and confused, I would want my mother to see me, to make sure that I was okay.”

“This is not about what Ben wants,” Leia argued. “This is about the Resistance and defeating the First Order. One person’s wants or needs are insignificant.”

“That one person is your son,” Rey reminded her, shaking her head as Leia stood before her, unbudging. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“My father was Anakin Skywalker,” Leia said and there was a brief flash of something in her eyes that looked like sadness or maybe regret. “He became Darth Vader trying to save my mother’s life. His focus on one person, no matter how loved, helped give birth to the Empire and the fragments of that then birthed the First Order. No one person is ever more important than the good of the whole.”

Rey frowned and shook her head before getting to her feet. This was clearly not an argument that she was capable of winning. She knew Leia loved Ben, but she would never bend on what she was capable of giving him or what she expected of him.

“Keep an eye on him,” Leia commanded as Rey turned on her heel and headed for the door. “The Resistance is depending on you.”

“They always are,” Rey grumbled.

The walk across base did little to improve her mood. Each person that she passed looked at her and then quickly away. They’d always been a little jumpy around her, a little unsure of her abilities, and though she’d gotten used to often feeling alone here even in a crowd, this was something else.

They were unwilling to meet her eyes, scattering out of her way before she could even get close to them. This was clearly about Ben, she realized. They had seen her with him, probably seen her defend him in the dining tent the day before and now they were afraid of her.

Afraid she might turn on them and embrace the dark side of the Force.

Rey rolled her eyes at their foolish worries as she opened the entrance to her own tent and stepped inside. Ben was waiting for her, lounging insolently on the bunk they shared and staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move when she entered, except for a lazy shift of his eyes to find her face.

Whatever he saw there didn’t seem to surprise him.

“She still doesn’t want to see me,” he said flatly.

Rey swallowed and took a few steps closer. “Uh…She’s...Well, it’s just that she’s…”

“You don’t have to lie for her,” he said, giving her a sad little smile that she thought was meant to comfort her but shattered her heart into tiny pieces on the floor of their tent.

She stumbled to a stop, the words and her feet both failing her as he sighed and sat up. The Force was dripping with his anger, vibrating with his hurt.

“I’m just going to take a walk,” he said, standing up and covering the space between them in two long strides as she struggled to think of what she could possibly say to fix his pain or even lessen it just a bit.

“I could go,” she offered weakly. “You don’t have to go alone.”

He pulled her close and dropped an absentminded kiss to her cheek. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised, and she knew that there was nothing she’d be able to say to him now that would be able to get through the wall he’d built to separate himself from the pain of his broken relationship with his mother.

Rey’s parents had left her, and she knew she’d always carry a wound in her heart from that, but she couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be just as abandoned and know that her mother was merely minutes away. What would she have done if her parents had come back to Jakku and walked right by without acknowledging her at all?

It seemed entirely likely that she would have thrown herself on the ground to cry and scream and rage. She would have begged, she admitted, pleaded with them on her knees to look at her again, to see her with love in their eyes.

“Ben,” she said, her fingers wrapping around his wrist to stop him. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

She sat on the bunk while she waited for him to return, watching the shadows created by sunlight and leaves as they crept across the walls and trying not to think about where he was or how she was going to ever look Leia in the face again after this.

There was a sudden spike of alarm in the bond, surprise that blended almost seamlessly into a bright bloom of pain that had her staggering to her feet and out the door before she even really registered that she was moving.

“Ben,” she screamed, running between the rows of tents and under the wings of battered aircraft as she tried to pinpoint where he was by following the waves of rage that were rolling into her through their connection in the Force.

She didn’t have to follow it all the way. The feelings lead her to a crowd of Resistance members huddled around something she couldn’t see as they screamed abuse and threats of retaliation at a lone dark-haired figure that was longing against the ladder of an X wing, wiping blood off his face and snarling at anyone that got close to him.

“Ben!” She dashed forward, ignoring the looks and threats as she flew into his arms and began to frantically check him for injuries. “What happened? You’re bleeding!”

He sniffed and wiped at the crimson stains on his face with his sleeve. There was blood still running from his nose, though a quick check assured her that it wasn’t broken, and more seeping from a split in his bottom lip.

“I think I’m going to have a black eye,” he said, glaring over her shoulder at the crowd behind her as he tugged her forward between his spread thighs and settled his hands in her hips. “You should see the other guy, though.”

“What other guy?” she demanded. “What did you do?”

“Your friend Dameron thought it would be a good idea to tell me that I needed to back off from you,” he snarled. “Told me that I wasn’t good enough for you.”

She sucked in a breath, her teeth clacking together as she shook her head. “That wasn’t a nice thing for him to say,” she said quickly.

“Were you with him?”

Rey froze, her hand resting on Ben’s chest and her eyes pinned beneath his probing gaze.

“Before I came here,” he explained. “Were you with him?”

“No,” she said. “I think maybe…”

“He wanted to,” Ben said, tugging her closer as his voice deepened threateningly.

“Maybe,” she agreed. “But I’m with you now and that’s what matters.”

“He doesn’t seem to think so,” Ben said, running the tip of his tongue over the swollen mess of his lip to emphasize the point. He dropped his forehead to hers and tears pricked painfully behind her eyes.

“Did you hit him?” she asked, finally flicking a glance behind her to see Poe standing in the center of the crowd she’d sprinted past, an enraged expression on his face and one eye swollen shut.

“Yes,” Ben said. 

She rolled her eyes and dabbed at the cut on his lip with a small piece of fabric from her armband.“You shouldn’t have hit him.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t have a lightsaber,” he said, “or I would have done worse than that. Besides, he hit me  _ first _ .”

Rey tried to look disapproving, but she couldn’t disguise the twitch in her lips at his petulant tone.“Why did he hit you?”

Ben’s eyes flashed and a dark current rose up out of him, intoxicating and tempting before he shut it down behind his shields. “I told him I wasn’t going to let him tell me to stay away from you and that if he didn’t like it, he should take it up with my mother.”

“That’s why he hit you?”

Ben shifted uncomfortably. “I told him you’d be in my bed if that’s where you wanted to be and that you’d seemed happy enough to be there last night.”

“You told him we slept together?”

“We  _ did _ sleep together.”

“Not like that.”

“I didn’t want him to know that or think he could get away with telling you who you could be with,” Ben said, his face set and stubborn. If she’d been looking for an apology, she knew she would have been disappointed. “You’re a person not his property.”

“And then he hit you?”

“Yes.”

Rey glanced over her shoulder again, meeting Poe’s eyes as he gave her a hard look. It was becoming increasingly clear to her that all of them had wanted her to pretend to be dating Ben while doing none of the things that people did while dating.

The impossible expectations made her furious. It wasn’t fair of them to ask any of this from her and it certainly wasn’t fair for them to judge her when she complied with their demands.

“Moof milker,” she grumbled, the words not quite under her breath enough to prevent Ben from hearing them.

He laughed, loud and unrestrained as heads turned to stare at them. “I hope you’re talking about him,” he said.

“I am,” she said, sighing deeply. “They make me so angry.”

“Yeah?” he asked, grinning and winking at Poe while she giggled. “Let’s return the favor.”

“How?”

“Like  _ this _ ,” he said, leaning forward to capture her mouth with his.

She stiffened for a moment, uncomfortably aware of the many pairs of eyes that were watching them disapprovingly, but he flicked his tongue against the seam of her lips and she opened for him instinctually, her worries immediately fading beneath the onslaught of his kiss. She tangled her fingers in his hair and pressed her body into him, desperately chasing the feel of his chest against her own and the heat of his mouth.

Poe’s disgusted exclamation registered dimly in the back of her mind, but she was too far lost in Ben to be worried about him or Leia or the consequences of the whole base seeing her like this.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a weird fixation with this story and I can't seem to write anything else so I'm just going to work on this till I finish it. The good news is that it should be done in a few days, the bad news is that you're going to get spammed with updates till then. So sorry!
> 
> I really appreciate all of your comments and I will be responding to them but I'm trying to get all of this down while the muse is on my side. Please know that I love and appreciate all of you!!

“You kissed him in front of everyone after a very public, very violent fight with Poe.”

Rey slouched in her seat, refusing to fidget under Leia’s questions or her bewildered glare. “It’s not my fault they were fighting,” she said. “Why isn’t Poe in here? He started it.”

“You’re all acting like children,” Leia huffed. “This is not the time for this behavior. The galaxy is depending on us.”

Rey bit her lip, swallowing a bitter comment about how much she preferred to be a passionate child than a bitter old woman who was so removed from her feelings that she wouldn’t even see her own child.

“How is any of this my fault? Or Ben’s? Poe is supposed to be keeping his  _ kriffing _ temper under control, so Ben doesn’t figure out that we’re lying to him. As many times as we’ve all slipped up around him, I don’t understand how he doesn’t know already.”

“Of course, he knows!” Leia’s outburst echoed on the cold rock walls. “Or, if by some miracle of the Force he hasn’t figured it out yet, then he soon will.”

Rey’s rage evaporated, smothered under a chilling certainty that she wished more than anything she could ignore. She forced her next words out from between stiff lips, her body numb as her heart tried to reject the truth her heart was telling her. “You knew he was going to find out I was lying to him.”

It wasn’t a question and Leia didn’t bother to treat it like one. “You’re too closely bound to him to pull off that level of deception even if you truly wanted to,” she said tiredly. “And there was never even a ghost of a chance that the entire Resistance could control their resentment toward him permanently.”

“Then why?” Rey jumped to her feet, balling her hands into fists at her sides. “Why would you do this to him? To me?”

“Because he wanted you and I knew it would distract him,” Leia said with a shrug. “I subtly allowed him to access the communications room, so he’d see that his place in the First Order had been taken and he had nowhere else to go. My hope was that he’d decide to make the best of his life here once he realized he couldn’t go back, but I underestimated their loyalty.”

“So, he knows he can go back,” Rey said, swallowing down her panic at the thought of being without him again. “Why is he still here?”

“Because you are,” Leia said sternly. “ _ You _ are what’s keeping him here and  _ you _ are the one that needs to convince him to stay until we can defeat the Order.”

“And if he doesn’t stay?” There was a cold and terrified pit in her stomach as she waited for Leia to speak the words that she knew were lurking just below the surface of these revelations. He couldn’t be allowed to go back, so if he wouldn’t stay…

“Then it will be your job to kill him,” Leia explained. “I don’t want it to come to that, but he can’t return to the First Order and you’re the only one who can do it. We don’t have the resources to imprison him nor can we risk the chance that he might escape or be rescued.”

“That’s why you won’t see him,” Rey said, spitting each word out as an accusation. “You can’t look him in the eye knowing what you’re prepared to do to him. What you’re prepared to make  _ me _ do to him.”

“I believe you can make sure that it doesn’t come to that.”

“But you still won’t see him,” Rey said, shaking her head at Leia’s half-hearted attempt at deflection. “And you expect me to keep him here by whoring myself out to him and then live with the entire base hating me because I’m with him.”

“Everyone makes sacrifices,” Leia said, unflinching under Rey’s fury. “Think of the lives that you’re saving.”

“You should have been honest with me from the beginning and allowed me to decide if I was willing to make that sacrifice.”

“You wouldn’t have done it,” Leia said, “so I didn’t have that luxury. I understand that you’re angry and that is  _ my _ sacrifice. To lead is to be alone.”

“You’re alone because you lie and manipulate the people who care about you,” Rey retorted. “This is exactly why Ben ended up with Snoke in the first place! People aren’t just tools you can use or discard. They aren’t weapons at your disposal.”

“You’ve never stood in my place,” Leia said, an edge of anger hardening her voice. “I’ve spent all of my life fighting against the Empire… the Order… Palpatine…Snoke. I lost my parents, my planet, my brother, my husband, and more friends than I can possibly count. My son is responsible for far too many of those deaths because he chose to embrace the very thing I have devoted my life to defeating.”

“So that makes it okay to deny him a choice? What about me, Leia? What makes it okay to deny me a choice?”

Leia didn’t respond as Rey stomped out, slamming the door behind her.

Panic clawed at her, hot and thick like fingers pushing up from her stomach into her throat, threatening to choke her. She knew that Ben was trying but here, alone in her own thoughts, she could admit that she could still feel the darkness in him when he wasn’t paying attention.

She hadn’t expected it to be otherwise. He either knew they were lying, and he was pretending to be Ben to get to her, or he believed them and thought he had lost all of his memories of being Ben again. Either way, the last thing he remembered was being Kylo Ren and crashing into her on some unimportant planet.

Giving him back his birth name didn’t remove all of the hurt and anger and pain inside him and she couldn’t blame him for being angry. Maybe she should, everyone else certainly seemed to, but she just couldn’t. She knew too much about the feelings he carried around inside him.

Those feelings…that’s what made him Kylo Ren. Not the lightsaber that she had hidden away in her tent, or the mask that his mother had destroyed.

As long as that darkness—the fear and the anger and the rejection—lived inside him, Kylo Ren lived inside him and she knew it.

His memories would never come back because the return of Ben Solo had been a lie, and that meant that someday Kylo Ren would try to leave this place…and when he did, she was supposed to kill him.

She dashed through the narrow spaces between the tents, slowing briefly as she considered returning to the one where Ben was waiting for her, but turning the opposite way at the next crossway when she realized that she’d never be able to keep herself from crying if she had to look at him right now.

Several pairs of eyes turned to watch as she ran until she reached the edge of their living area, only slowing to a walk as she passed the dining tent to as to not draw any more attention to herself, and then disappearing into the shadows beneath the wings of the Resistance’s mismatched aircraft fleet.

Her chest heaved as she finally stopped long enough to lean against the peeling paint on the side panel of an X wing, but even over the sound of her own heart racing and her lungs fighting to draw in a decent breath she could hear the sucking squish of footsteps approaching across the wet ground and a pair of familiar voices chattering indistinctly as they drew closer.

She wasn’t in the mood to deal with anything else today and she clambered into the cockpit of the fighter, ducking down out of sight just as Rose and Kaydel came into view below her.

“Are you sure she went this way?” Rose looked around curiously and Rey sank down lower to ensure she wouldn’t be spotted.

“Yeah, I saw her run off after she passed the dining tent. She’s probably off doing something with Kylo Ren.”

“Ben,” Rose corrected.

“He isn’t and you know it. He’s never going to be Ben and he’s never going to be welcome here.”

“I know,” Rose agreed, shaking her head. “But we have to pretend to believe it if we’re going to keep him here. That’s the plan, remember?”

Kaydel snorted. “I’m not the one who needs reminding.”

Rose shifted and looked over her shoulder guiltily. “Rey is just doing her job.”

“Is she?” Kaydel asked. “We’ve all seen the way she looks at him and is it really her  _ job _ to kiss him the way she did in front of Poe? Looked like she enjoyed it to me.”

Rose sighed deeply and shrugged one shoulder uncertainly. “I guess it did, didn’t it? I don’t understand her. How could she…How could she want to touch him after what he’s done to all of us?”

“Maybe she’s more like him than we wanted to believe.”

They disappeared around the next corner before Rey could hear Rose’s response and Rey climbed slowly down from her perch. She could feel the sobs in her chest struggling to get out, but she pushed the feeling down as she stumbled to the nearest large ship and slapped her palm against the button to open the entrance ramp.

No one would bother her in there.

***

It took him hours to find her.

He’d felt her distress in the Force not long after she’d gone to see his mother, but all trace of her had disappeared before he could track her very far, locked away behind stubborn mental shields that for once might have been a match for his own. He was strangely proud of her developing focus, even if it did cause him to spend much more time looking for her than he would have needed otherwise.

He wasn’t sure what had happened, what Leia could possibly have said to her that would have upset her so much that she hadn’t returned to him in the tent, but whatever it was he knew he needed to find her and fix it.

Upsetting Rey like this was just one more tally on a wall of grudges Kylo held against his mother and someday—Force willing someday  _ soon _ —he would finally be in a position to make her answer for all the ways she’d hurt him. 

He found Rey huddled in a dark corner on board a filthy ship that should have been decommissioned a few years before he was born. She wasn’t even sitting on a bench or a toolbox. She had her legs tucked up tight to her chest and her face pressed into her knees as her slim shoulders shook with sobs that echoed down the rusted durasteel corridor.

She was so lost in her own sorrow that she didn’t seem to feel him coming or notice the dull thumps of his boots as he crept closer.

“Rey?”

She jumped, her head snapping up and eyes flashing until she recognized him in the dark. There was a wet sniffle and a hiccough before she turned her face away. “Leave me alone.”

“I can’t,” he said, kneeling beside her and gripping her chin in his hand as he wiped at her cheeks with the hem of his shirt. “You’re the only one here that likes me.”

She made a choked sound that might have been a laugh in the beginning but ended on a broken sob. “I think you might be right.”

“I usually am, it just takes people a while to realize it.”

She was silent as she considered that, and he was content to wait as the last of her tears fell and she dropped her head back against the wall with a weak chuckle. “I didn’t go back to the tent because I didn’t want you to see me cry.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I was worried about you.”

“Afraid your mother was going to break me?” she asked.

“Didn’t she?”

“Not all by herself,” she said, and there was an extra layer of betrayal in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. Whatever had upset her had involved more than just Leia and redoubled his resolve to tear the whole planet from the sky.

“Wanna talk about it?”

Her laughter tipped from wetly amused to slightly hysterical as she pushed to her feet. “No, I really don’t.”

“You’re still not alone,” he said, crowding closer until he could feel the warmth of her and skim his fingers up the side of wrist. “You never have been.”

“I’m always alone,” she argued as she tipped her head back to look at him. “You don’t really know me. No one does.”

“But I  _ do _ ,” he countered. “I’ve always known you. Even the parts that you don’t want anyone else to see.”

Silence stretched between them with no interruption except the steady rhythm of their breathing. She didn’t move away from the soft caress of his fingers on her arm, but he could feel her rising anxiety.

She had her back pressed to the wall, trapped between the cold durasteel of the ship and his chest. He knew she wanted to run, he could feel it in the Force, her panic as it skittered across her mind and over her nerve endings.

But she couldn’t, not without admitting that he’d never held her like this for so long without the distraction of his mouth on hers or sleep to claim her. That she’d never been held close enough to him to be enveloped mercilessly by his scent and feel the hot fan of his breath on her cheek. She was as trapped by her lies as she was by his body and he smiled against her temple, his lips gliding softly against her skin and making her squeak softly.

The walls of the ship suddenly seemed like a haven, an oasis of privacy in the crowded confines of the base. There were no dancing shadows here to remind him that anyone walking by would spook her, no sudden giggles to remind her how the sound of her own voice might carry. The last fragile obstacle between him and seeking the solace of her body had been stripped away.

Her emotions rolled over him, desire mixed with fear and apprehension.

If he had been a different man—a better one like Dameron or that traitor FN-2187—he would have let her go. But he wasn’t a better man, he wasn’t even a good man, and so he let himself drift closer, pulled in by her heat and the soft little panting breaths she was making, until his nose was nuzzling at the soft flesh of her neck and he could feel her heartbeat just beneath the skin.

It slowed down, skipping beats in her frozen state, and then raced forward, eager to make up for lost time as it fluttered erratically. He could almost hear it, the telltale beating of her heart, and he thought he might have if it hadn’t been for the small moan that escaped her when he pressed his lips to the sensitive spot just below her ear.

She was on edge, her body tense and tight as she fought the urge to run, and he took advantage of her heightened senses, kissing and nipping his way along her jaw until she swayed against him, lost to the sensations, a stranger even to herself.

When he sank his teeth into the column of her slim throat, her knees buckled, and it was only his body pressing against hers that kept her on her feet.

“Ben…”

It was a whisper, almost imperceptible even in the quiet, but he hummed an answer, an acknowledgement, even as he turned his attention to her mouth.

“Do you know why I hate that name?” he asked, punctuating each word with a kiss.

She shook her head, mouth already parted slightly to taste him.

“Because it reminds me of my parents,” he said, grasping her jaw in his grip, waiting for her to open her eyes and focus on him.

There was a spark of resistance in her gaze, a look of annoyance and something else, something that looked like stubbornness or denial, and he knew she was going to lie before the words ever left her mouth.

“Your parents gave a damn about you.”

“They didn’t,” he countered. “Not really. Oh, sure maybe they did a little bit, on the surface, but not deep down where it mattered. Do you know where it matters, Rey?”

She shook her head, tugging against the pressure of his hand.

“It matters in the place where people make their choices,” he said, biting off each word as her eyes focused hungrily on his lips. “And they chose to leave me alone, to send me away. Just like your parents chose to leave you.”

She sniffed, indignant, but this time she didn’t argue with him and could feel it radiating out of her. She knew the truth, she’d accepted it.

“People care in their actions,” he explained. “When they leave you, Rey…when they use you, when they lie to you…then they don’t love you.”

She flinched, trying to turn her face away as he tightened his grip and sucked her bottom lip into his mouth, running the tip of his tongue over the scab she’d given herself from sinking her teeth into the flesh there so often before pushing her head back against the wall. The back of her skull bounced off the hard surface, the cushion provided by her hair not enough to stop her from wincing.

“People only really love you when they want you for who you truly are,” he finished. He knew he was taking a risk, but there was enough of his father’s heart in him that he didn’t mind if the reward was substantial enough. “I’ll never  _ really _ be Ben Solo.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

He wondered briefly how much that admission had cost her, how deeply she’d been clinging to her idea that he was a good and redeemable person to try and justify her feelings toward him. She’d tried so hard to pull him to her side so that she could want him without guilt…how much had it hurt to know that it would never happen, and she wanted him anyway?

“Rey?”

“Hmm?”

“Say my name,” he ordered, his mouth hovering over hers.

“Kylo,” she breathed, and he descended, hauling her against him as his mouth plundered hers, laying vicious and violent claim to the only thing in the galaxy that mattered. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I added a few tags to the story for things that have come up while writing this chapter. It's explicitly stated that this is Rey's first time having sex, Ben's experience is left ambiguous and is not stated outright. I also added a few tags relating to the Resistance's treatment of her later in the chapter.
> 
> I also increased the chapter count (again) from 8 to 10 because this chapter only got us through about half of what I had hoped to cover.

She could tell by the way he was touching her that things were different this time. He’d been slow the other times he'd touched her, cautious and careful to keep his attention on her mouth and his hands resting firmly and non threateningly in one spot. The feel of his lips had been enough to make her heart race and her knees tremble, but he had seemed unsure of his welcome and content to let her take as much time as she wanted to decide what she was willing to give and how far she was willing to go.

He wasn’t unsure now and was no longer following her lead as his mouth traced a path across her cheek to lavish attention on the lobe of her ear and his hands wandered freely over every curve he could reach.

There was a strength in his muscles and a confidence in his caress that she’d never noticed before and she shivered under the possessiveness in his gaze and the surety in his hands. His hair was soft beneath her fingers as she tangled them in the dark waves, pulling him close and murmuring encouragement until he lifted her off her feet and she had to wrap her legs around his waist to keep her body stable against his.

Pinned between the rusted surface of a dirty durasteel wall and the equally hard press of his body, she realized quickly that there was nothing to stop her from giving herself to him completely now. She had already lost her friends, her connection to Leia, and the fragile feeling of belonging that she’d been clinging to in this place.

He was the only person here who had never turned away from her for being what she truly was and the ache of Leia’s orders and the lies she’d been forced to tell him was a throbbing and constant pain that she had to push into a hard ball of regret that lodged itself just below the broken heart in her chest. It was the only way to avoid sobbing the truth of her betrayal into his chest and begging him for forgiveness.

Because maybe he was just as much Kylo Ren as he was Ben Solo, but the truth was that it had never mattered. Kylo, Ben, both, or neither one at all…he had seen her. Not as an orphan or a scavenger or a Jedi or a savior.

He saw her as Rey, with all of her pains and her triumphs, her successes and her failures, her light and her darkness. He’d seen it all and he’d never questioned whether he wanted her at his side. The Resistance had placed impossible expectations on her shoulders and all Kylo Ren had ever asked of her was to accept him the way he was and let the past die.

For the first time, she questioned whether she had made the right choice.

The thought stole her breath and she struggled to push it out of her mind, to replace that seed of doubt with images of faces that belonged to people whose lives she had saved on Crait. Maybe they weren’t as kind or as welcoming as she had once wanted to believe, but surely, they hadn’t deserved to die. She had been right to save them, even if it had meant turning away from him and tearing out a piece of her own heart in the process.

No matter what they were, she still had a responsibility to them. As a Jedi, if nothing else, she reasoned.

He stilled, pulling his head away from hers to look down at her with a curious gaze and she knew he had felt the brief flare of her panic in the bond. His eyes were questioning, and she knew he was giving her something that no one else ever had.

A choice.

She should end this now, she realized. Push him away and not compound all of her previous betrayals by letting this go any farther between them. She had a responsibility that she couldn’t turn her back on, but he didn’t deserve to be given any more false hope of what they could be. Just because Leia thought it was acceptable to make a whore of her to get to him, didn’t mean she had to allow herself to do it and hurt him that way.

There was a pause where he waited patiently as she gathered her strength to deny him, but in the small space where everything within and around her settled into perfect stillness the darkness inside her that she had always denied surged to the surface of her mind. She was fragile, split open on hurt and passion, and there was something in Kylo that called to something in her. It was dark and selfish and hungry, urging her to open herself up and take what she could get while she was still able to.

Before it was too late.

Before she lost him.

She nodded, giving him the answer to his silent question, and she didn’t give herself time to question whether she was making the right choice now. Darkness thrummed inside her, alive and pulsing as she resolved not to think about anything but him until they left this ship. If all she was to have in life was the memory of him, then she would have memories of this.

His hands slid under the hem of her tunic to tug aside her breast band and curl his fingers around the curve of her chest and maybe she should have been horrified that they were really going to do this here amidst the filth and the rubble of a decades old rebel ship but, somehow, she couldn’t imagine that it might ever have been any different for them. There had never been a chance for them to come together without conflict and even if they did somehow manage to make it to a bed someday, she had never imagined them there.

Scenes of them together had haunted her dreams but they had always been on a stone bench in an ancient hut or pressed against the wall of an elevator or on the floor of a throne room that was coated with the remnants of battle.

In her dreams, she had let him take her on a blanket of sweat and blood and fire.

That reality was a cold, rusted ship wall and a hot, hard body seemed appropriate in a way that she knew she could never rationally explain but felt in her heart, nonetheless. 

She let herself get lost in him, her body responding greedily to the caress of his tongue and the bruising press of his hands until he suddenly set her back on her feet. A noise of violent protest tore itself from her throat as she stared up at him with wide eyes, tightening her fingers on his shoulders to try and keep him from stepping away and leaving her.

“Shhh,” he soothed, untangling himself from her grip just enough that he could fumble with the fastenings on his pants. “Step out of your boots.”

Heat rose painfully in her cheeks as she realized that he had put her down because he couldn’t undress her with her legs wrapped around his waist.

“Don’t you dare feel embarrassed,” he ordered, pressing a kiss to her cheek as she pushed a boot off with her toe and winced at the feel of dirt and grime under her feet.

He barely waited for her to have the other boot off before hooking his fingers in the waistband of her pants and shoving them down over hips and then down her legs until they pooled in a heap on the floor around her ankles. As soon as she was bare from the waist down, he lifted her up again, cupping her naked bottom in his hands and giving her a quick and intimate squeeze.

“I’ve dreamed about this,” he said, and she nodded against his shoulder, the almost imperceptible motion the closest thing she could get to admitting that she had dreamed of him, too.

He rocked his hips against her, and she realized that he’d unfastened his own pants, but he hadn’t pushed them any lower on his hips. The part of him that was hard and grinding against her core was still safely tucked away out of sight.

She rolled her body, pressing against him as sensually as she was able, and grinned at him when he sucked in a harsh breath between his teeth.

“Tell me you want me,” he said, reaching between them to tug his clothing aside and take the length of his cock in his hand.

“I want you,” she said quickly, pulling him in to kiss him and nip desperately at his bottom lip. She was not a complete stranger to the concept of sex—that was impossible for those raised on a wild planet like Jakku where people didn’t bother to hide their animalistic rutting—and she knew well enough what to expect even if she had never done it herself. “I’m ready.”

Maybe if there had been more time, or they were different people, there would have been more time for soft touches and slow kisses, but that wasn’t in the cards for them and she wouldn’t waste her time wishing that things had been different. Her eyes remained locked on his as he lined himself up with her entrance, refusing to show him any apprehension or hesitation.

He thrust into her in one smooth stroke, driving himself in all the way to the base with one quick push of his hips.

There was a burning stretch that just crossed the border between pleasure and pain and she scrambled to hold him, tightening her thighs and clenching around him with muscles inside her that she hadn’t even known existed until now.

His head dropped onto her shoulder and he sighed like the many fragmented pieces of his soul had just settled back into his body. Relief and triumph washed over her from his side of the bond and guilt rose inside her to meet it as Leia’s words tumbled around her horrified mind.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded, helpless. “Please, don’t stop.”

He settled his lips on her neck as he began to move, sucking a stinging spot into the flesh that she suspected would probably bruise the skin just above her collar. She knew she should stop him, should protest a mark that would mark what they had done so publicly, but what could the Resistance say about her now that they hadn’t already said?

He pulled out of her slowly, watching her face as he almost separated them before sinking back into her. Every thrust, soft and achingly slow, split her open around him, demanding that she make room and then rewarding her for her softness by filling her until she had no more empty spaces inside.

It was true for her body and she feared that it might also be true for her heart.

The thought brought tears in her eyes that she couldn’t keep from falling because he was looking at her, moving inside her, like he thought this was only the first time and she was terrified that it might be the last.

His eyes locked on her face and she turned her head away to disguise the evidence of her soft weeping, but he skimmed the corner of her eye with his thumb and frowned when it came away wet. He tried to pull away, but she refused to allow it, gripping him tighter and shifting her hips to urge him on as he cupped the side of her face and kissed her until her worries faded into nothingness and all she could think about was the taste of him and the friction of each slow slide of his body.

Only when she was calm and relaxed again did he hitch her leg higher over his hip so that he could get deeper inside her and move at a faster pace.

Her breath caught on a surprised moan as he pushed deeper and stretched her farther and she hadn’t known it could get any better than what it was at the beginning but somehow it  _ did _ and noises she didn’t recognize were pouring out of her in a steady stream that only seemed to urge him into even harder thrusts.

Everything was suddenly just so much more than she’d thought it could possibly be and there  _ something _ deep inside of her was building and she could tell that he could sense it in her the same way that she could feel the echo of it in him.

“Kylo?” His name was nothing more than a panted question on her lips as she clung to him, but she knew he would hear her.

He always heard her.

“Just let go,” he grunted, seeming to understand the question that she didn’t have the words to ask. “I’ll take care of you, just let go.”

She shuddered under the words, reaching for the elusive sensation that danced just out of her reach until he let go of her hip and found a place on her body that she hadn’t known existed but was immediately convinced must contain the wonder of galaxies of a thousand galaxies.

A few lazy strokes of his fingers were enough to shatter her and send her spiraling breathless and blind into oblivion. Her hips jerked against him and her body clenched as he rode her through it, his pace merciless and unyielding as she lifted dazed eyes to his.

“Don’t take your eyes off me,” he said. His voice was harsh, like he meant for it to be a command, but there was an edge of vulnerability to it that made it seem more like a plea. “Don’t look away. I want to see you.”

She kept her gaze on him as his hips moved faster, each thrust bringing the edge of his pleasure closer to the surface in the bond between them. He was faster and sloppier now than he had been when he was focused on pleasing her, and the air was filled with his satisfied grunts and the wet sounds of her body that she would have considered obscene under any other circumstances.

When his eyes finally closed on a deep moan and he buried himself in her as far as he could, his body twitching inside her, he coated her insides with waves of surprising warmth.

His breathing was ragged against her temple and she curled against his chest with her legs still locked around him, safe and protected by his body.

“Are you okay?”

She stirred at the words, humming agreement against the salt and sweat of his skin.

“Rey?”

“Hmm?”

“I love you.”

She stiffened in his arms for the space of a heartbeat. Leia had said he probably knew that they were lying to him, that he was only here because he wanted to be close to her. She shouldn’t trust him but…When had Kylo ever lied to her?

“I love you, too.”

***

She refused to regret saying it just as much as she refused to regret anything else that had happened between them, though the Resistance didn’t make it easy for her.

The sun rose on a base full of rumor about where they’d been and what she’d done. She ignored the stares and the hard searching looks sent their way by everyone they passed on their way to the obstacle course, her chin tipping up shamelessly when someone’s eyes lingered on the purpling mark his mouth had sucked onto the pale skin of her neck.

Kylo’s eyes had widened in surprise when she’d leapt into his arms instead of spending the morning running the course, but she’d discovered she’d rather use their private time to tug him down onto her in a bed of soft moss than dodge stunning laser fire from a practice droid and when they walked into the dining tent at lunch he had a matching purple mark just so that she could watch with a simmering resentment as everyone clucked their tongues and whispered in disapproval.

She wasn’t going to pretend that she hadn’t taken him for her lover. If they had problems with it, they could take it up with Leia. The general had no problem with the idea of her using her body to influence Kylo’s decisions, so she didn’t think she had anything to worry about from her.

Rey knew she was taking every bit of happiness she could get from this situation while she had the chance, but she was also doing the job that Leia had assigned her.

As long as he was in her bed, he might stay. As long as he stayed, she didn’t have to kill him.

She ignored the small pit in her stomach and the little whisper in her mind that told her that she would never be able to do it. That it was far too late for that now.

If he stayed, she wouldn’t have to choose between her responsibility as a Jedi and her lover’s life.

The atmosphere in the dining tent at dinner was infinitely worse, and even Rey had to admit that letting him roll her on top of him in their own bunk after lunch might not have been the wisest idea. The thin canvas walls of their tent hid nothing, and she hadn’t been able to keep quiet when he was splayed out beneath her and his hands were gripping her hips as she rode him into mindless pleasure.

Leia might have something to say about her lack of discretion, the total absence of subtlety, but when he looked at her with that now familiar heat in his eyes, she was powerless to resist him.

“Slut.”

Rey ignored it, her head not even turning as the group of Resistance mechanics walked by their table and laughed at the humiliated blush on her cheeks.

Kylo started to rise from his seat, his teeth clenched and his eyes black with rage, but she shook her head quickly. “It’s not worth it.”

“It’s worth it,” he growled, hesitating for a long moment before looking at her face and dropping back into his chair. “They have no right to say that to you.”

“You should listen to your little whore,” a voice from across the room interrupted. “You don’t want to pick a fight with us.”

Rey didn’t see who said it, but she knew it had come from a long table to her left… A table where Finn and Rose and Poe were sitting, staring with an unnatural focus at the food on their trays. She knew the voice hadn’t belonged to any of them, but it was also clear that they weren’t speaking up for her.

They weren’t going to defend her, she realized dully, and even though she’d been reacting to the anger from the Resistance members with petty behavior of her own, it still hurt to know they weren’t even pretending to be on her side.

It seemed Leia hadn’t explained to them the exact nature of what she expected from the Resistance’s only Jedi, so she was truly going to be alone if Kylo tried to leave her.

She reached out for him, her hand finding his on instinct to keep him from rising. There were tears in her eyes and she could feel the rage simmering just beneath the surface of his skin.

“Please don’t,” she asked, her plea a broken whisper as she clutched at his arm, her fingers tight and sharp on his wrist. She needed him to stay, needed him to not fight with anyone else, because it was clear to her now that Leia’s plans had taken everything else from her.

Kylo was now all that she had.


End file.
